Carole Douglas - Cat in an Alphabet Soup

“Thanks a million,” Temple said, eyeing the bag. As she took it, the unexpected weight nearly jerked her arm out of its socket, recalling her first fond moments of custody of Midnight Louie. “These will be great. And I deeply appreciate your arranging for Mr. Big to drop by our lunch table later, Lorna.”

The Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce PR director sipped her murky orange Manhattan and nodded soberly. “We could have had lunch with him, except that ABA meals are working occasions. You’d be amazed at the megabuck deals that go down at this superficially innocuous convention. He’s eating here anyway, and if you recognize his lunch date, don’t let on! The deal isn’t signed yet. But he will stop by for a few minutes. He wants to insure that Chester Royal’s death causes as little scandal as possible.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t know the name brands in publishing. I’m too ignorant to blow a deal. Trust me.”

“I do, that’s the funny part. Emily at Baker & Taylor thinks a lot of you.”

“You know her?”

“We behind-the-sceners responsible for making the ABAs run smoothly year after year get to know each other.”

“How did Lieutenant Molina’s grilling of Lanyard Hunter go yesterday?”

“I wasn’t invited, but Hunter was in a vile mood afterward.”

“So was Molina, probably. This is definitely not her normal turf.”

“I don’t blame the lieutenant. How’s she going to nab a murderer in four days flat with twenty-four thousand strangers in town?”

“Somehow I don’t feel too sorry for her.”

Lorna Fennick laughed. “No, I wouldn’t want to negotiate a deal with that one.”

“Did you? Ever negotiate a deal, I mean?”

“Some small ones. I started as an editorial assistant and worked my way up to editor.”

“How’d you get into public relations?”

Lorna looked uneasy. “I didn’t have the stomach for nitty-gritty editorial matters. It can be a frustrating, petty business. Now, what did you want to know about my liege lord?”

The waiter descended. To save time Temple ordered the first thing that popped into her mind—tuna salad. Lorna had some nouvelle concoction with chard and assorted alien vegetables whose repugnant appearance was exceeded only by its outrageous price.

“Tell me about an imprint, Lorna,” Temple suggested after forking her tuna salad. The sight and smell repelled her for some reason. “How is one born, how does it grow, how is it grafted onto a big mother of a plant like a major, multi-slashed publishing house?”

Lorna turned her Manhattan glass until the cherry pointed Temple’s way. “It’s like this. Some enterprising person—an ex-publishing executive or even a rank amateur like Chester Royal—begins packaging a certain kind of book. That means he finds the authors, edits the books, commissions the cover design and hands the house a ready-to-go book. They print and distribute it. If, as in Royal’s case, the book is a medical thriller when the only solid-gold practitioner in the field is Robin Cook, and the packager attracts aspiring med-thriller writers, he’s on his way to a stable of authors. Say his books do well for the big publisher who buys them. When they do spectacularly well, the publisher grafts the imprint and its founding editor onto the corporate tree. Then you have Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce-Pennyroyal.”

“So Chester was a big success story.”

“Yes, imprints are becoming more common. The system allows the little guy to take the risks and prove a product’s durability. He must have a good track record at finding authors who perform at a predictable level of success. Then his promising small company is acquired by a big company that can increase his business effectiveness.”

“Only this business is books, and artistic egos are involved.”

“And a product’s marketability is less determined by statistical consumer need than amorphous factors like trends, luck and instinct.”

“Vegas is a perfect location for an ABA, then. From what you say, publishing is a crapshoot.”

“But a classy crapshoot, Temple. Some book people cringe at the idea of having an ABA in a crass commercial arena like this town. It’s the antithesis of publishing’s Manhattan roots. Yet they must. This convention center is one of the few in the country big enough to handle a display and crowd of this size.”

“So what was Chester Royal’s story? How’d he happen to hit it big—and get hit?”

“He stumbled across Mavis Davis, number one. She was a long shot for established publishers, who turned down her first book in droves. But Royal with his medical background saw something there, and the rest is history.”

“Medical background?”

“He trained as a doctor, even practiced briefly, I guess, decades ago. That’s what he had that regular editors didn’t; firsthand knowledge of the field. Apparently it was a magical combination in medical thriller fiction.”

“About Mavis Davis—”

“She’s having a nervous breakdown over Chester’s death. I know.”

“From what I can tell, she was hooked on him as her editor. There’s something almost sinister about his influence over her.”

Lorna’s mouth quirked, and she took a long swig on her drink. “Listen. A lot of us at RCD-about-to-be-slash-P didn’t approve of Royal’s methods, but we couldn’t argue with his bottom line. His imprint was essentially independent although RCD distributed his list and shared the profits. He got plenty out of it personally, believe me. More than the old buzzard deserved. He ran his own fiefdom, but he had a compulsion to handle his authors with an iron hand. He underpaid and overedited them into numb obedience and, frankly, that’s why his bottom line was so attractive. This is a business, Temple, it’s not an experiment in the nobility of the human spirit. Sometimes the meanest bastards make the most dough.”

“Owen Tharp seems rather realistic—and bitter—about the system. Yet he got along with Royal.”

“Some writers did. A lot didn’t.”

“Couldn’t the unhappy writers just leave the imprint?”

“Sure, they left, but Royal kept pulling new gullible ones from his slush pile. His madness had a method: to prove that his judgment, not any particular writer’s talent, was the cornerstone of Pennyroyal Press’s success.”

“And was he proving that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was his bottom line still firm? How long could he afford to alienate his more independent authors? How long could an abused writer like Mavis Davis remain productive under such pressure?”

Lorna shook her head, her expression troubled. “Temple, it’s the real world. Jobs are being lost out there, paperback books are being returned in huge percentages, publishing houses are going under.”

“Exactly. How could a heads-up company tolerate an ego mill under its wing? The law of diminishing returns holds true for paperbacks, too. Maybe nobody was admitting it, but his bottom line was crumbling. Claudia hinted that Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce was ready to dump Royal, if it could, for running his own imprint into the ground. Those whom the gods would destroy they first make mean.”

“He was mean,” Lorna spat out suddenly. “He was a mean, small-souled man. Why do you think he kept Mavis Davis down on the farm? Ex-Doctor Royal despised nurses; he didn’t want them to benefit at his expense. Everyone knew that her terms were worse than simply being a shrewd deal for the publisher. Other houses tried to lure her away, but she was so brainwashed into thinking she needed Chester Royal... I don’t know if she’ll ever write another book, now that he’s dead.”

“Then she wouldn’t want him that way, would she?”

“Mavis? A suspect? You’re dreaming.”